Welcome to Writing North 15: Coming Home. All events will be held in the Main Lounge at St. Andrew’s College at the University of Saskatchewan (1121 College Drive) in Saskatoon. Two events – Friday’s Feature Talk and Saturday’s Panel - will also be livestreamed, recorded and available for 30 days after the festival on SWG’s YouTube channel. We encourage attendees to wear a mask during the festival.
The entire festival is free. All are welcome. All times are posted in Saskatchewan time; please consult your favourite time zone converter.
Presenter and host bios are available here.
Accessibility information is available here.
Friday, January 24
Feature Talk: “Further Migrations: How Ancestral Family Rumours Become Fiction” with Jane Urquhart and Reception on Friday January 24
7:00 – 9:00 pm
Main Lounge, St. Andrew’s College and live-streamed
Jane Urquhart will present an illustrated talk about ancestral tales told to us as children, and how they can sow the seeds for adult fiction. Reception to follow the talk.
With an introductory poem and greetings by Saskatchewan Poet Laureate Peace Akintade-Oluwagbeye to open the festival.
Saturday, January 25
Homing In: Memory, Place, and Eco-Poetics: An Interactive Talk
with Sarah Ens
10:00-11:30 am
Main Lounge. St. Andrew’s College (in person only)
Poetry can be a habitat for ecological thinking, an imaginative space where, through language, image, and memory, readers and writers perceive, encounter, and interact with complex webs of relationships. In this workshop, we will attend to the memories bound up in the particular environments we call home and write towards them. We'll also look at poetry by Dionne Brand, Camille Dungy, Louise Halfe, Don McKay, and others.
Ethical Remembering: On Writing Memoir”: An Interactive Talk
with Lisa Bird-Wilson
1:00 – 2:30 pm
Main Lounge, St. Andrew’s College (in person only)
In this workshop participants will explore what it is exactly that makes fiction engaging, emotional, and convincing. Christie will also discuss some concrete strategies to better develop the ability to captivate the reader, through the use of unexpected detail, conflict, tension, and specificity.
Panel Discussion “Life Lanes: the Complexities of Home and Home-Making”
with Jane Urquhart, Lisa Bird-Wilson, Sarah Ens, and host Rachel Laverdiere
2:45-3:45 pm
Main Lounge, St. Andrew’s College and livestreamed
Home. We leave home, come back to it, make new ones. Sometimes home is a place, a community, a person. Sometimes it’s more complicated than that. Join us for a panel discussion with writers Jane Urquhart, Lisa Bird-Wilson, and Sarah Ens with host Rachel Laverdiere, that explores the home—What are the complexities of home? Of home-making? Is “place” and “home” the same? What is place, then, and what is home? What are home’s intricacies?
